This document summarizes a presentation given by Michael Jones of eBay on applying lean and agile principles to content management. The key points are: 1) A small team of content managers at eBay experimented with agile techniques like user stories, daily standups, and retrospectives over 12 weeks to make their work more visible and collaborative. 2) They started with low-tech solutions like sticky notes but realized some tasks added workload, so they rolled back. They also extended sprints from 1 to 2 weeks. 3) The team observed benefits like easier reporting, better workload estimation, and transparency, but still struggled with task estimation and have more to learn from other teams. 4) Next steps

1. Copyright © Institut Lean France 2013
3 & 4 October, 2013
Paris, France
European Lean IT Summit 2013
Lean & Agile digital content
Michael B Jones - eBay

2. LEAN & AGILE FOR
CONTENT
MICHAEL JONES
Senior Manager, Digital Content
October 3, 2013

3. A COUPLE OF WORDS
ON CONTENT AT EBAY
This case study describes how a small team of content managers and strategists is
experimenting with agile techniques and lean principles to run the business and
support strategic programs at eBay. Inspired by the developers we partner with,
we've picked methods and techniques from agile, scrum and lean. We have tried
and adjusted our set up over a period of four months and are about to upgrade our
set-up technically and try scaling the approach to a geographically dispersed team.

4. WHAT IS CONTENT AT EBAY? WHAT DOES IT DO?
GLOBAL AND LOCAL:
COMBINES SCALABILITY OF
GLOBAL PLATFORM WITH
LOCAL FEEL
A MEANS OF
MULTIPLE CUSTOMER USES:
SUPPORTS USERS IN
ACHIEVING THEIR TASKS
CONNECTING WITH OUR
CUSTOMERS TO
INFORM, RE-ASSURE,
MULTIPLE FORMATS & TYPES:
TEXT, VIDEO, IMAGES, AUDIO
UI, HELP, MARKETING, CS, EMAIL
ENGAGE AND INSPIRE.
-------------------------------------
COMMUNICATES TRUST
MAKES EBAY FEEL LOCAL
A WAY OF
DIFFERENTIATING US
MULTIPLE CONTRIBUTIONS:
A HYGIENE FACTOR, A BUSINESS
ASSET, A DIFFERENTIATOR
FROM OUR
COMPETITORS
COLLECTIVELY:
OUR LARGEST CUSTOMER
TOUCHPOINT
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5. VISION: TO ENABLE COMMERCE BY CREATING
CONTENT CUSTOMERS LOVE
MISSION:
To produce personalised,
engaging content.
In multiple formats and multiple
languages.
That works hard on all devices
and platforms.
That differentiates us …
… at scale, globally.
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6. THE TEAM
• We are a small local team within a large global organisation.
• We are a support function evolving into a strategic one. Keeping the lights on by fixing bugs, maintaining
existing assets. Adding value to customers by creating new assets.
• Content work is knowledge work – decision making and highly skilled execution (parallels to coding)
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7. WHY & HOW WE
TRIED AGILE
There are many other teams at eBay who are more advanced in using
agile/scrum and lean startup principles, but for product management &
development.
We are trying to learn from them and find the right mix for our kind of
knowledge work.

8. REASONS FOR EXPERIMENTING
• Our previous set up (Outlook & Sharepoint) at breaking point –
causing errors and confusion.
• Team felt overwhelmed, didn't know what each other is working
on.
• No overview of requests and projects - making planning,
prioritisation, expectation setting, progress tracking hard.
• Inspired by hearing about Oobeya, A3 and lean leadership
principles (particularly focus on the vital few; visual & frequent
stand up reviews; standardisation, stability & Gemba
management)
• Lean Startup book has popularised lean principles in 'our' world,
meaning greater acceptance and understanding of trying this
out.
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9. NOTES FROM OUR AGILE DIARY…
WEEK 1: 3.06.2013
“Difficult first attempt at agile planning. Took 90 mins to assess just 4
user stories. Struggling to find right balance btw. Some of the
discussion felt like micromanagement. All of us outside our comfort
zone. Full range of responses from very keen to reluctant.”
(WEEK of 13.06.2013
All of team involved in an off site conference for most of week, so
sprint was skipped.)
WEEK 2: 20.06.2013
"Our second ‘agile’ week – better progress on planning and getting
an overview by post-its on our windows. We’ve still got a way to go
with this, but already we have a better overview of the (planned)
activities.”
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10. NOTES FROM OUR AGILE DIARY…
WEEK 3: 27.06.2013
"Our third ‘agile’ week. Managing to have daily standups (shortest one was 10 minutes, longest ran to an
hour, so there is some work to do on tightening them up!). It feels like we are uncovering issues more quickly
than before and are more efficiently sharing what we are all working on.“
WEEK 4: 04.07.2013
"Our fourth ‘agile’ week. Daily standups not so regular this week. Realising that this is more than just another
planning methodology – it is actually a fundamental shift in how we think about our work and its purpose. It
is about learning and iterating in fast cycles – the plan-do-check-act cycle. It is about transparency and
making visible what is often ‘hidden’ in our inboxes."
WEEK 5: 12.07.2013
"Not much to report on the agile front this week, other than we are progressing and starting to build up a
good rhythm. That will surely be tested as many of the team are out over the coming weeks (including me,
starting Monday)."
WEEKS 6, 7 & 8
Agile habits irregular whilst we had reduced team coverage over school holidays.
PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE
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11. NOTES FROM OUR AGILE DIARY…
WEEK 9: 09.08.2013
“Coming back from vacation, it was a bit of an effort to get the agile
practices going again. This showed me that the new ‘habits’ are not
fully established yet and need continued discipline.”
WEEK 10: 15.08.2013
“Agreed with team experiment with longer 2 week sprints. This should
allow us to focus planning and tracking activities more on the big rocks,
following the insight that it is not possible or necessary for us to track
all ‘business as usual’ deliverables. First one of the longer sprints starts
Monday 19th”
WEEK 11: 22.08.2013
“We started the first of our two week ‘sprints’ on Monday. So far, so
good.”
WEEK 12: 30.08.2013
“Observations from our first two-week sprint – for the Bigfoot activities,
it worked. […] some of the other activities slipped […]. In part this was
because […] we were lax in estimating the time effort for the
deliverables. […] Another observation was that our planning board only
contained a fraction of the actual work done by the team – telling us
that we again need to be more diligent about scanning our inboxes and
other channels for incoming work and ensuring that this is fed into the
planning..”
PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE
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12. SUMMARY OF APPROACH
• Made work visible - Low-tech solutions to try methods quickly sticky notes & whiteboards.
– We took it too far - rolled back when we realised that
transferring an xls to the window and back again was just
adding to the workload!
• User stories to define deliverables
• Started with 1 week sprints, then extended to 2 weeks to
lessen the meeting load (planning & retros).
• Meeting cycle - planning / daily standups / retrospective
• Now booking around 40% of teams' available time. (Goal is to
get to 70%)
PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE
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13. WHAT’S NEXT
There’s no going back for us, but this is still early days and we expect to
iterate the processes regularly as we scale the approach.

14. NEXT STEPS
• Scale to the other EU teams - geographically dispersed, so
we'll to adapt methods
• Considering an experiment with Kanban
• Upgrade from post-its to JIRA + Greenhopper, differentiated
swim lanes for bugs, BAU & projects
• More learning from the teams around us & external
• Build out tracking and reporting in JIRA to capture customer
impact, level of effort & stakeholder survey
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15. WHAT WE LEARNT
• Dailies & retros help us manage and measure our work – i.e. how
well we scoped different types of tasks; seeing problem processes
which we then tackled by standardization.
• We’re able to evaluate bandwidth more realistically – we observed
reduction in overtime (although other factors also played a role)
• Has enabled easier reporting (up & out); aiding prioritisation,
stakeholder management and team transparency.
• We're still struggling with task estimation; still too much debate in
planning and dailies; haven’t nailed format for our ‘user stories’
• Making the team's work visible meant everyone knew what each
other is working on
• Pragmatically & quickly cherry picking methods and diving in with
lo-fi tools important to accelerate change process
• It’s crucial to build habits & iterate
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16. THANK YOU
Any questions or feedback very welcome!

17. Q&A
CONTACT
EMAIL:
mijones@ebay.de
LINKEDIN:
http://de.linkedin.com/in/michaelbjones/
TWITTER:
@MikeJonesBerlin
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18. Copyright © Institut Lean France 2013
3 & 4 October, 2013
Paris, France
More Lean IT videos and presentations on
www.lean-it-summit.com